either destroyed in the flames or killed as they rushed forth to escape.
Tradition has it that Pythagoras was later seen by a shepherd on the
mountains, but the probabilities are that he perished with his people.
But you can not dispose of a great man by killing him. Here we are
reading, writing and talking yet of Pythagoras.

[Illustration: PLATO]

PLATO

How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the
question, "How does love suit with age, Sophocles--are you still
the man you were?"

"Peace," he replied; "most gladly have I escaped that, and I feel
as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master."

That saying of his has often come into my mind since, and seems to
me still as good as at the time when I heard him. For certainly old
age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax
their hold, then, as Sophocles says, you have escaped from the
control not of one master only, but of many. And of these regrets,
as well as of the complaint about relations, Socrates, the cause is
to be sought, not in men's ages, but in their characters and
tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel
the pressure of age, but he who is of an opposite disposition will
find youth and age equally a burden.

--_The Republic_

PLATO

A thinking man is one of the most recent productions evolved from
Nature's laboratory. The first man of brains to express himself about
the world in an honest, simple and natural way, just as if nothing had
been said about it before, was Socrates.

Twenty-four centuries have passed since Socrates was put to death on the
charge of speaking disrespectfully of the gods and polluting the minds
of the youths of Athens. During ten of these centuries that have passed
since then, the race lost the capacity to think, through the successful
combination of the priest and the soldier. These men blocked human
evolution. The penalty for making slaves is that you become one.

To suppress humanity is to suppress yourself.

The race is one. So the priests and the soldiers who in the Third
Century had a modicum of worth themselves, sank and were submerged in
the general slough of superstition and ignorance. It was a panic that
continued for a thousand years, all through the endeavor of faulty men
to make people good by force. At all times, up to within our own decade,
fra